THE HARD STUFF STUFF BOOKS & DVDs
Just A Shot Away: 1969 Revisited Vol 1
Kris Needs NEW HAVEN PUBLISHING
Excellent, moving memoir by veteran music journalist.
The slew of 50th-anniversary reissues and accompanying retrospectives is in danger of reducing the year 1969 to a set of truisms: Altamont, Manson, The Beatles falling apart, the hippie era in decline… Which makes Kris Needs’s perspective on the year (the first of two volumes) so much more valuable. He only turned 15 that year – on the day Brian Jones died. The mid-teens are the years in which the feelings of future music aficionados are most intense, full of epiphanies and discoveries crashing on the virgin sands and (a prototype for the yet to emerge 70s-style ) or listened to on John Peel’s radio shows.
